Kamby Bolongo Mean River named one of 25 Important Books of the 2000s by HTML Giant

KBMR was named one of 25 Important Books of the decade byHTML Giant. And was a Page One selection of New & Noteworthy Books by Poets & Writers Magazine.

Monday, July 18, 2011

No news today - Guest Post - Laura van den Berg

Nine Ways Not to Start a Novel: Discarded First Lines

1. We were lying in the dark.

2. We were lying in the dark—it wasn’t like city darkness, softened by streetlights and houselights and headlights, but like the bottom layer of the ocean, where nothing lives and nothing grows.

3. We were lying in the dark—it wasn’t like city darkness, softened by streetlights and houselights and headlights, but thick and black as paint.

4. Lights Out was at ten o’clock and it brought the darkest night I’d ever seen.

5. It was dark.

6. Today the Hospital was going to look inside our minds.

7. After the pilgrims, life in the Hospital changed.

8. We never understood what they could have wanted from us.

9. Everything was a story.

Laura van den Berg’s first collection of stories, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc, 2009), was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection, longlisted for The Story Prize, and shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor Award. She lives in Baltimore and is revising a novel, which, thankfully, no longer begins with any of these lines.

Fiction

About Me

Robert Lopez is the author of two novels, Part of the World and Kamby Bolongo Mean River and a collection of short fiction, Asunder. He has taught at The New School, Pratt Institute, Columbia University, Pine Manor College's Solstice Low-Res MFA Program and was a 2010 Fellow in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Email - lopezr@newschool.edu
rcl0831@aol.com